Blog of a course that allows students to learn how to use books, newspapers, magazines, journals, archives, databases, and the Internet to find and evaluate information on legendary creatures such as Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and other cryptids. It also encourages the developement of critical thinking skills to deal with extraordinary claims and ideas for thinking about them.

Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Articles? What Articles.

In my search for the thunderbird, the sources
that I have struggled with finding the most were journals and magazines. Thunderbirds as actual birds, apparently, are
not common in these types of materials.
Thunderbird searches for magazines and journals resulted in probably
about 95% cars. Being very specific in
my searches lead to more promising results, however not always what I was
looking for. Most articles about the
actual bird pertained to pieces of art – which thunderbirds are fairly common
in– and not so much information about the bird itself.

I
read about one account of a magazine article in 1848, although the actual
magazine was not cited (Unexplained America).
Beyond that however, specific articles and journals were nearly
impossible to find. I found an article
that looked very promising; it’s title being “Thunderbirds, Thunder-beings,
Thunder-voices: The Application of Tradition Knowledge and Children’s Rights in
Support of Aboriginal Children’s Education”.
I assumed that this would lead to some sort of valuable information
pertaining to thunderbird history incorporated into the education of children. Alas, past the title, there was no mention of
the thunderbird. This happened in most
of the seemingly encourages articles.

Another
article reported a sighting of a thunderbird in September of 2001 where four
people sitting in a yard heard a great noise and supposedly saw a bird with a
wingspan of over 20 feet fly past them.
The article explains the noises of the bird as it flew past, and the
estimated height of the bird (Salem-News). I Googled the news source, Salem-News, only
to find that the only information about the site I could find was what was
provided on the site itself. There is a
newspaper titled The Salem News, which
is located in Massachusetts. With this
information, I am left unsure as to how credible this source is.

There
was one article that did serve some importance; it was an article about World
War II and a totem pole that resided on a ship.
While the story of war had no special significance to my search, the
article did contain valuable background information to the thunderbird itself. Granted the main information was knowledge
that I found on every other source on thunderbirds, however this article made a
connection between the bird and the war that was quite interesting, and also
provided a small tale about the thunderbird.

There are so many different products, companies, and concepts with the name 'Thunderbird' that finding that actual bird has proved to be very difficult, especially when looking at articles and journals.